A Name and The Forest
by HVK
Summary: Steven, through unspecified circumstances, wanders a forest with the company of the brutal but warm-hearted giant robot; his new friend puts on an act of being mean and scary, but Steven knows Sugilite. He knows all about big things that everyone thinks is scary, and he knows how to get through to them.


Long story short; for about a week now I've had this idea knocking around in my head of doing a full story of a crossover between Steven Universe and Transformers, focusing on a friendship with Grimlock and Steven; initially my idea was of transposing the sad and grim realities of Grimlock's life of eternal war and life with the relative peace of Earth until the war finds him there (perhaps embodied by Airarchnid and her zombie-robot-vampire Insecticon army, hungering for any Energon substitute), but I found the idea of doing something cute, sweet and fuzzy a little more appealing.

To rev myself up for brainstorming on what to possibly do in that future fic, I wrote this story to jazz up and maybe work out their character interactions.

Disclaimer: I do not Transformers, Steven Universe, or any related copyrighted intelluctual properties. This is a work of entertainment without any monetary gain.

* * *

The ground blasts as though with thunder, and who-knows-how-many tons of living metal smashes into the grass, bladed edges turning grass into shredded mist as the foot pounds grass remnants and dirt along into a mass of something like dust. It fountains up with the next great step, as it has for the mechanical behemoth's passage through the forest.

One could, if they wished, track the walk through the woods by the geysers of pulverized dirt, the trees knocked down in his wake. Like a canyon pushed through the canopy of green, the uneven tide of leaves abruptly bleeding the dimmer colors of the ground beneath. It would be easier still to simply listen for the peppy words interrupted by the grumbling.

A gigantic foot, a little shapeless and not much more than a broad surface to support a massive leg and the even more massive body striding forth, crashed into the ground again, shaking grass loose for dozens of feet around and bringing down low-hanging tree branches and showers of leaves from the shockwaves. Many blades extended from the side, like a nightmarish mesh of bird-claws dozens of times larger than anything found in nature, snapped into the ground. They retracted, almost shyly, avoiding the small humanoid carefully walking with the giant robot's stride and always managing to be well out of the way of the stomps while keeping up pace. A heroic feat, given the sheer size of the robot's stride; the boy knew _streets _back home that were shorter than the giant's stride.

But he was familiar with giants. He knew all about keeping up with people a lot bigger than him.

(_A huge mouth, bristling with jagged teeth and ferocious fangs like something out of a religious mural of a goddess-monster arrayed against the terrible things seeking to devour humanity, and five eyes staring down at him from behind triangular sunglasses. The sun is blocked by her massive, broad body, bigger than a building and stronger than an avalanche, and she _looks _scary, she is fearsome to behold, and when she hunches over and asks if he wants to see something cool, it still never occurs to him to _be _afraid._)

He also knew all about big things that looked scary and thought that they were monsters. He knew when they were lying about it, maybe even to themselves.

Green and black plates like skin and armor combined in something different and alien shift as the bigger one comes to a stop, yellow-red glowing in circuit lines in the great metal body brightening a bit. Maybe he was worried or angry. It was hard to see the giant robot's face; he was just so _big _and it was hard to see past the masculine swells and sharp edges of his torso, particularly from this angle.

Steven Universe frowned faintly. He felt displeased with himself. He likely wouldn't articulate it this way, but at his heart he felt that it was his job and nature to be a mediator between the things of this world and those from outside that might still call it home. Having trouble really understanding one of those things felt like he was doing it wrong.

"What's your name?" He said, for the fifth time in the last twenty minutes, trying to be friendly and do better at the whole thing.

He didn't get a response, again. Not verbally, at least: an arm thicker around than a dozen of the trees around them shifted to the side; the giant turned aside, blue electronic eyes looking over the treetops toward the stars overhead, fixing at a certain point and staring there. Steven heard something like servos moving when the giant moved; metal plates shifted now and then, internal machinery shifting bits of his body around like transformation was as natural for him as magic was to a Gem.

And the big machine-giant (for he _was _a machine, Steven thought; a machine, maybe a robot, that felt and thought and was definitely kind of a grump) looked hurt. Old hurts. But Steven had seen deep scoring in the metal, little bits over his eyes and into what looked like a helmet but was part of his head, over where his brain could have been, scars all over his body and older than any human nation you could name and maybe one or two Gems. Scars; old scars, deep scars, _bad _scars...

And the giant robot, staring far into the sky to a home he barely remembered these days and miserably suspected that he'd now be shunned as an abomination there, frowned and turned towards Steven as if he noticed him just now and had not been spending the last two and a half hours very carefully not stepping on him or so much as nudging him too forcefully. When he spoke, his voice was deep and resonant, echoing weirdly on certain syllables like other voices were talking with him in unity. "You still here, little tiny thingy?! Go _home_ already!"

Steven considered this. He tried to think of a way to explain Warp Pads and how broken the closest one was (mostly because the big robot guy was really bad at paying attention to where he was going except when it came to small squeaking and squishable things) and remembered that the big robot might be a total mystery to him but he pretty obviously had a really short attention span and not a lot of patience. He settled for being straightforward: "Nope!"

The robot growled, his mouth rows and rows of sharp killer's teeth, and turned aside. He didn't argue about it. "Keep up," the robot grumbled. "You're little. And soft and stuff. You'd get broken easily. You get broken and the strong ones here will yell at me and stuff. I hate it having to explain messes."

"I promise not to make myself a mess!" Steven said, clapping a hand to his chest. He adjusted it a moment later to his stomach, because he thought that swearing on his gem would be more dramatic. "You got my word as a... um, uh... whatever kind of thing I am?"

The big robot stopped abruptly. He was standing in such a way, and angle, that Steven could see his face. Broad, scarred, weird collapsible bits at the side that had turned into a battle-mask and a translucent visor that had folded away into his head... he looked startled at what Steven had said. He muttered something, and in a louder voice, said, "Yeah, yeah. okay. Yeah. Good enough."

He moved in such a way that Steven noticed his shoulder. There was a mark there; it looked almost like a face, robotic and solemn and exalted. Pearl had told him that that particular symbol was _old. _Not as old as the Gems, but a lot older than humans were. She made it sound like most of the machine-people who wore that symbol had it painted on or something similar. This was sharp marks, jagged and sliced through each other, through a surface bundle of partially melted metal...

Like there had been another mark there, before, and the big robot had _melted _it off and cut this new symbol into it with something hot and sharp. Steven wondered how desperate you would have to do to erase something like that, or just how angry.

Steven decided not to ask him why he had said something about that sounding familiar, and he hurried along as the big robot stomped forward, pulling a building-sized tree out of the ground with the same level of effort as it would have taken Steven to bat dust out of the air. The tree flung sideways, a metal wrist twisted and turned-

The tree went flying. A good portion of the forest abruptly exploded.

"There," the robot said, sounding pleased with himself. He noticed Steven giving him a distraught look. "Old dead wood, see. No new growth there. Not good for the forest. Gotta clear out bad stuff when it's too old."

He chuckled darkly at that. "Revolutions make everything _clean._"

Steven tilted his head. "They do?"

"In my experience, yeah. 'Specially if the thing that needs cleaning is really nasty." The robot considered this and added, "And if you end up in one, make sure that the leader of the revolution _isn't _a complete slag-head that'll end up taking everything order and poisoning your planet-god for the steroids of super-evil or whatever. You'll thank me on this. Trust me."

Steven took out a note book and wrote all that down. "...'Steroids of super-evil or whatever'. Got it!" He put the notebook away.

He got a weird look from the big robot that became a brief but sunny grin. "...Kinda nice, to have someone _listening _to me for a change."

When the robot said this, his mouth glowed from the inside, like he had a furnace for lungs; smoke, golden and blazing for a moment before going out, wafted out from between his teeth. There was no impression the robot was even aware of it, or maybe was just so used to it he'd stopped paying attention.

Blue eyes, brilliant and bright like a stove-top flame, flickered from the sky (_to a home lost, a home that wasn't a place for him now, maybe never again_) to the ground; to the odd boy here and now.

Deep breath, judging where or not to be open.

"Grimlock."

Steven looked up. "Huh?

"My name." The robot indicated himself. "That's me name- _my _name. Me. _Grimlock._"

Steven's mouth opened, and he abruptly realized the little bit of success here. He raised his hand up instinctively. "Cross-species moment of understanding! High five!" He hopped up and down, and stopped, realizing too late how much bigger Grimlock was than him and how hard it'd be for him to do a proper high five. "Oh, wait, it's okay-"

Grimlock knelt down, shaking the ground. He raised a claw bigger than Steven, and gently tapped it with his palm. Steven barely trembled, though Grimlock was strong enough to punch a hole in the mountain. (He saw this happen later, actually. In his own defense, Grimlock insisted that mountain _totally _was making fun of his dad, seriously. No inanimate object mocked the great Wheeljack without suffering due penitence for it. Steven understood the impulse.)

"Hey, uh. Little thing," Grimlock said, cautious. No, awkward.

"My name is Steven."

"Yeah, that too. Look. Uh. Little thing." Grimlock grinned sheepishly. Later, Steven would come to think of this as the 'happy dinosaur smile'. "Wanna see something _cool?_"

Steven thought about big scary things that called themselves monsters; that there were big things in the world, powerful things, mighty like old stories about gods and titans, and that there was such an idea as a hero-monster, and just for a second thought that he might just be good at helping people who thought they were bad because they were scary.

"Yeah!" Steven said.

Grimlock grinned, his yellow shining and glowing bright, and he, long thinking of his alternate form as a scar or something terrible and unnatural (and only recently coming to grips with the idea that he actually _liked _having something as bizarre and unthinkable as a _beast mode_), slammed his fists into the ground, gave a mighty roar, and thousands of metal plates rearranged themselves as he _transformed._


End file.
